WordPress Monthly Maintenance Care Plans

Why you need a Maintenance Plan

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in use today. It's a great choice for many kinds of websites but it needs ongoing updates and maintenance to stay in top shape.

Due to this popularity, it's also the #1 CMS most attacked by hackers and malware. Extra measures need to be taken to keep your website secure and to quickly recover from an attack.

Updating WordPress is more than just pressing buttons or turning settings on. Most WordPress websites are made up of many 3rd party plugins and theme (design) customizations. This can make updating your site tricky, as updates can break compatibility between all the various components.

You’ve invested a great deal of time and money into your WordPress website, and we understand how important it is to you. Maybe your site is your primary marketing tool or maybe it’s the entire engine behind your business. With so much riding on your site, are you protected so that if the worst happens you can be back online with minimal downtime? One of the most common malware or virus attacks are called "defacing", the attacker replaces your home page with their own images and this can be quite embarrassing if not caught and fixed quickly - we can be your disaster recovery plan!

We know how to keep your website healthy and safe by keeping malware at bay, dealing with plugin conflicts, performing core updates, maintaining backup archives, managing proxy firewalls and CDNs, and more. And, if disaster strikes, we know what to do to get your site back online before your business suffers.

How we help you

  • We save you time: Most business owners don't have the knowledge or time to deal with maintaining and monitoring their website, scanning for malware, dealing with plugin conflicts, or handling system restores if things go bad. We do!
  • We keep your website secure: We know how to keep your website healthy and safe with continuous malware scans, file monitoring, protecting the login page, maintaining backup archives, implementing HTTPS, and more.
  • We can fix it: If disaster strikes, we know what to do to get you back online before your business suffers. On Silver and Gold plans, our uptime monitor alerts us the moment the site goes down, and we monitor files that have changed.
  • We can make your website even better: As part of our maintenance care plans, we make recommendations on how your website can be improved. These improvements are centered on design, security, hosting quality, performance, usability, and more. Don't let your site stagnate!
  • We are available for more: Not only do we provide monthly care of your website, but we are a full service web development shop. Any time you want to make changes, improve the site, migrate, upgrade, change themes, or build a new feature, we are right here to take on projects at a reasonable hourly rate. It's like having a web developer employee in your back pocket to use only when needed! If you want to implement any of our recommendations, just say so! And if needed, any extra time will be invoiced separately. Simple!

Every Plan Includes the Following:

  • Monthly updates to WordPress, plugins, and theme (depends on type of theme used).
  • Offsite backups.
  • Uptime monitoring and reporting.
  • Security plugin with basic site hardening and brute force login protection.
  • A monthly report of tasks performed, pending issues, uptime performance, and more.
  • Help with configuring 3rd party services like analytics, Google Console, Tag Manager, etc.
  • Included time for extra tasks or troubleshooting issues that come up.
WordPress Logo

Bronze

$95/m
  • Monthy updates and site checks.
  • Daily offsite backups to Amazon S3 with 7 daily plus 7 weekly retention.
  • Security software and site hardening in WordPress.
  • Local image optimization.
  • Uptime monitoring.
  • Triannual audit scan (bad links etc).
  • 1 hour retainer time. *
  • Monthly report.
  • Standard hourly rate on overtime and projects.

Silver

$150/m
  • Monthly updates and site checks.
  • Daily offsite backups to Amazon S3 with 14 daily plus 8 weekly retention.
  • Security software and site hardening in WordPress.
  • Local image optimization.
  • Uptime monitoring.
  • Quarterly audit scan (bad links etc).
  • Site review and suggestions as they come up.
  • File change monitoring.
  • Monitor SSL and domain expiration.
  • 1.5 hours retainer time. *
  • Monthly report.
  • Hourly rate reduced by $10 for overtime and projects.

Gold

$250/m
  • Most updates and site checks done manually for stability.
  • Daily offsite backups to Amazon S3 with 30 daily plus 8 weekly retention..
  • Security software with strongest protections enabled.
  • Local image optimization.
  • Alerts and tickets are given highest priority.
  • Regular audit scans.
  • Manual site reviews and suggestions.
  • File change monitoring.
  • Monitor SSL and domain expiration.
  • Visual regression monitoring on the home page.
  • 2 hours retainer time. *
  • Monthly report.
  • Optional assign custom functionality tests after updates.
  • Staging site used before any major updates and projects if available.
  • For the highest security and performance, we may recommend changes to service providers.
  • Hourly rate reduced by $15.

    • Select Gold when your site has tricky or custom features, custom theme and code, problematic features prone to bugs, ecommerce, or requires multiple bespoke considerations for care. And you want to configure the best possible performance and security. We will help you get there!

* Your retainer time is reduced whenever visiting the site and working on it manually. The time it takes to perform some of our basic chores does not reduce your time. In most cases, simple emails, phone calls, texts, or tickets asking basic questions will not reduce your retainer time. If there is a major issue like a crash or downtime, we prioritize fixing it even if it may go overtime so that there is as little downtime as possible. Overtime is tracked and billed monthly in 15 minute increments.

There is an onboarding fee of $99 to integrate a new domain into a plan. This covers the initial setup, cleanup, basic audits, installation and configuration of our tools, and communications to gain access to hosting or other services. This fee is reduced to $50 if you are an existing customer with a site already on a plan.

Addons

eCommerce Support

$35/month

For sites with ecommerce features. We ensure your website works great by providing additional services and testing of your store. We'll make sure eCommerce functions are continuing to work after maintenance is done, such as the shopping cart and checkout pages. We'll help make changes and configure your store, as well as include additional store-related recommendations.
Please add this if your website has ecommerce or you sell anything or take payments. It is needed for that extra complexity!

Firewall Protection

$15/month

For businesses concerned about extra security. With this addon we will add your site to Sucuri, a proxy firewall service that filters all income traffic before it ever reaches your web server or host. The service allows for mitigation of DDOS attacks and also includes malware cleaning, static file caching, and free SSL. This addon requires a change to your domain DNS records to point to Sucuri. Firewall protection is highly recommended, but check with your host to see if they already have a security layer for web traffic. We can also use Cloudflare, one of the most popular proxy services out there. They have various plans and addon features we can explore.

SMTP Relay

$4/month

Robust outgoing email. If your host does not offer proper outgoing SMTP servers, and you don't have an email provider that allows transactional emails to be sent through it, we offer a 3rd party SMTP relay service. We will validate your domain with 3 CNAME records in your DNS, after which we can send emails through your website and bypass the hosting. You don't have to adjust your existing SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records, and it does not interfer with any existing email services you use. You will have 2000 emails/month quota which can be upgraded if needed. Note that this is only for transactional outgoing emails. This service is not for bulk marketing newsletters and it does not receive email replies. Can't be used with GoDaddy because they require using their own email relay.

FAQ

  • What do I do if my website is down?

    We monitor uptime at 5 minute intervals. During business hours we'll get notified of the downtime and can verify it. If you have a high priority addon, we are notified directly of the downtime and can act on it immediately even outside our regular business hours.

    If you find the site is down and you have a Bronze or Basic plan and want to make sure we look at it, send an email to support to create a ticket and we'll follow up.

    Unless you have a very powerful hosting company, some amount of downtime per month is expected, you will see this on your monthly reports. Often, downtime doesn't last more than a few minutes before the site comes back up on its own.

    To handle downtime, we sometimes must contact your hosting company. A good host will have 24/7 support with quick access to tech support. If there is no access to tech support, there is very little in our control to bring the site back up and we must wait it out. The best option is to make sure you use a quality hosting company and that we have access to the account in order to contact support when needed!

  • How do I request support?

    Simply email support@wallaceitsolutions.com and a ticket will be generated for the account associated with your email.

    You can also fill out a support form here.

    You are free to use tickets for anything from support requests to asking questions. Tickets are answered during business hours. With the high priority addon, we'll look at the tickets outside of normal hours as well.

    We can also arrange to have phone calls, video conferences, and screen sharing sessions if needed.

  • Do I really need an eCommerce Addon?

    If your site includes a store, this addon is highly recommended. The last thing you want is to find out that customers have not been able to check out for weeks! This addon provides extra time to test the store functionality. We make sure the cart functions, checkout page works, orders are coming through, emails are going out. There are many things that can go wrong with a shopping cart after system updates. A theme problem could arise causing script errors, a plugin becomes incompatible with another plugin, etc.

    Short of requiring this addon for all eCommerce sites, we do allow eCommerce sites not to buy it, but you will have to keep a close eye on your own store and submit a ticket if you find any problems. This is also easier if you have a way for your customers to contact you to report problems directly.

    What we don't want to see is a shopping cart that nobody is keeping an eye on, and customers who can't report issues!

  • What if I need more support time than what the plan includes?

    When we notice a very obvious issue during our maintenance work, the support time is used to get it fixed up right away. The problem will be detailed in your monthly report, and you won't have to worry about anything!

    If there is a problem which is considered "major" and your retainer time doesn't cover it, we'll generate a ticket for you to detail the issue and have additional time approved first before we work on it at our normal rate.

    If, over time, we find that your site needs regular "extra" work, you are free to buy additional monthly retainer time and have it automatically added to your bill.

  • What if I want to improve my graphic design?

    You can consider us a full service shop! Just let us know what you want done and we'll bid you a price on it. For large projects, we'll add you to a project management tool to keep track of progress and tasks over time. We can bill by the hour or put together a flat price on the project.

    Everything we do is just a support ticket away and we can work together from there! The recommendations we give can be very little things all the way up to very big things, entire site redesigns if we feel it will benefit you in the long run.

    We're not only here to work for you, but also to answer questions, so feel free to ask about projects and talk about your site as much as you want! Consider this a built-in consulting service!